Codecademy Closes $10 Million Round

Codecademy, a New York start-up that is trying to teach the world to code, has closed a $10 million funding round with, among others, London’s Index Ventures.

The start-up has turned in to something of a zeitgeist and has even signed up the Mayor New York, Michael Bloomberg, who said he would learn code this year. London Mayor Boris Johnson, a man more at ease with Catullus than C++, was reported by the British Broadcasting Corp. to be “in awe” of Mr. Bloomberg.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt embarrassed the U.K. government into scrapping its unloved school information-technology curriculum. Mr. Schmidt said the country that invented the computer was “throwing away your great computer heritage” by failing to teach programming in schools. “I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn’t even taught as standard in U.K. schools. Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it’s made.”

Zach Simms, the 22-year old co-founder of Codecademy, said the money, also coming from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Virgin-founder Sir Richard Branson, DST’s Yuri Milner and Union Square, would be used to fund expansion into new markets. It’s Codecademy’s second round of funding.

“We will launch foreign-language sites in German, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and Chinese,” he said. The translation is being done by the site’s users.

“The day we launched, someone downloaded the site and translated it into Japanese and then sent it back to us. Unfortunately we had no way of hosting a Japanese site then,” Mr. Simms said.

Some have criticized the whole learn-to-code meme, most notably Jeff Atwood in his blog Coding Horror. “Software developers tend to be software addicts who think their job is to write code,” he wrote. “But it’s not. Their job is to solve problems. Don’t celebrate the creation of code, celebrate the creation of solutions.”

Mr. Simms is unapologetic. “Think about it less as coding and more as algorithms,” he said. “Traditionally there are the 3 Rs—reading, writing and arithmetic. We think algorithms should be the fourth. Not everyone has to learn to code, but needs to learn the notions of algorithms, realizing what you can use code for.”

He was also mindful of accusations that while start-ups make much of their claim to create jobs, a lot of those jobs are high-end developer jobs. He said Codecademy wasn’t just about teaching people to be programmers, but about helping people learn higher skills. “There are definitely people who become programmers through the site, but there are also people using these courses to level up what they are doing anyway, like someone going from being an administrative assistant, to someone who can write HTML and CSS for email campaigns.”

The company, based in New York, was founded in August 2011 and employs nine people. It raised $2.5 million in its first round in November 2011. It has some 400 courses on the site, which are user-submitted not written in house, and launched its Code Year, signing up 450,000 participants — among them Mr. Bloomberg.

Mr. Simms said the model would work in other areas as well as coding, although he had no plans to branch out yet.

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